Tracking Bible Prophecy Headlines - 4/27/2019

... the real danger lies in the potential for Amazon to aggregate all that information and use it to try to manipulate us — or for others to get their hands on it and use it against us.

Conversations that Amazon records can of course tell the company a lot about us. For example, the questions we ask and directions we give Alexa — like "what's the weather?" or "play jazz music" — can indicate a great deal about what we like and care about. ...

The types of things we do with Alexa can also be extrapolated to make predictions about us that are often eerily accurate. ...

Whistleblower Christopher Wylie, former staffer for Cambridge Analytica — the consulting firm that worked on President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and allegedly improperly accessed data from Facebook (Cambridge Analytica has denied the allegation) — has noted that our choices of music and clothing are key clues to our political beliefs. Do you buy Wrangler jeans? If so, your political beliefs are likely conservative, according to Wylie. A recent working study by economists at the University of Chicago also found that our purchases can predict our race, gender and education with an accuracy of as much as 90%. ...